


Fair Weather Soldiers

by glasscaskets



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cold War, Espionage, F/M, Gaslighting, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Mental Instability, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Peggy/Dan Sousa, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, This is weird, cold war era political paranoia, kind of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2016-01-10
Packaged: 2018-05-08 11:23:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5495360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasscaskets/pseuds/glasscaskets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s two days to Christmas, 1963. In the wake of the assassination of the president and his wife’s second miscarriage, Howard Stark works to keep the Soviet threat contained. Peggy Carter celebrates her tenth wedding anniversary. The Winter Solider waits, unseen, in Cambodia, putting out fires and setting some new ones, and the newest feather in SHIELD’s cap is renowned tactical genius, veteran, and counterespionage expert Alexander Pierce. As the Cold War grows ever colder, Captain America comes out of the ice. </p><p>OR: the weird Steve-as-American-quasi-Winter-Soldier with bonus Cold War paranoia and Peggy nobody asked for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Historically, this fic is situated at the end of 1963, a year and a half after the Cuban Missile Crisis (the closest the world ever came to a legitimate third world war) and a month and change after the assassination of President Kennedy. I've always imagined the technology and realities of the Marvel Universe/MCU mean that the Cold War played out slightly differently, but as of now things have gone roughly the same as they did in our universe (excluding all the secret capers only the top minds at SHIELD and HYDRA know about ;)!). 
> 
> Oh, and the Soviets really did set off a test bomb powerful enough to blow out windows as far away as Sweden, in October of 1961. Wild shit!

_Prologue: December, 1963_ To be truthful, Howard didn’t want to go home. Maria had been weepy lately, and there was so much more he couldn’t tell her. Grim reports came to Howard’s desk daily, and it seemed like entirely too many people expected him to fix it. So he built bigger bombs, and, two years ago, when the Soviets set off a tester that blew out windows as far away as Stockholm, took to replacing breakfast with bourbon. He could always build a bigger bomb. The CIA wanted him in their corner, to keep Khrushchev on a leash; SHIELD meanwhile was still (nominally) signing his paychecks, and _their_ latest obsession was rockets. Some for the moon, though that had been Peggy’s idea.

And so it was poring over memos and blueprints, wondering idly how much longer France’s grip on Indochina could conceivably last while the radio droned on its fifth tribute to the late President Kennedy of the evening, that Howard got the call he’d been waiting for since V-E Day.

Peggy, breathless, on the phone, told him in a rush of garbled details—the northernmost, westernmost reaches of Canada, just out of Russia’s territorial waters, how about _that_ , a plane, a B-17 Flying Fortress no less, with a body inside it, yes, that body—“Howard,” she gasped, “they think he’s still alive.”

It would later be pointed out that Howard never called Maria, or indeed anyone, to say where he was going; in point of fact he himself wasn't sure how he had gotten to LaGuardia or to D.C., only that suddenly he was in the dimly lit lobby of SHIELD's new headquarters, caught in Peggy's wild hug.

"Sweetheart," he said, and made a show of kissing her cheek.

"Howard, you remember Dan," she said, and Howard nodded and stuck his hand out to the rumpled man next to Peggy, who was leaning on a cane, her husband who, Howard realized, he hadn't seen in five-odd years. He was a quiet man, nice enough, a veteran who, it had come to light some years earlier, would have died in Italy were it not for the intervention of the ever-guileless Steve Rogers.

Steve.

Alive.

"Peggy, he's _—_ he's really?" 

"Oh Howard," she said, and hugged him again.

 _He’s alive_ , she told him on the phone, and “He’s alive,” she said now, and it had taken twenty years but it was over, Howard had _found him_.

“He’s not awake yet,” Peggy said, “and they’ve not decided how they’re going to, to tell him. But. Oh, Howard, he’s here.”

***

_—aim downwards this is my choice Peggy—Peggy?—Peggy?—nose to the water, hands on the controls, ready steady fire, and then he hits and his body rattles and breaks and he’s still strapped to the seat, what an idiot, every rib is broken his collarbones are in pieces his pelvis is shattered, he’s wrenched forward and can’t move, can’t move, help no no Peggy!—_

“Captain Rogers? Can you hear me?”

His hand twitches. He tries to move his head. He can move.

_—the white-blue overwhelming his forward visibility crashes forward, shatters, everything is so slow and yet he can’t catch up, cold like millions of needles, eating him alive, the plane is coming apart, he’s thrown forward and something crushes into his stomach, both legs twist, everything shatters, millions of needles under and over and through his skin his ears his eyes his lips his teeth his fingernails his brain—_

“Captain Rogers? Can you open your eyes?”

_—lungs full lungs on fire can’t breathe can’t breathe needles unstitching can’t breathe Bucky can’t breathe who was just here was it Bucky? Peggy?—no air left everything shattered all these needles turning to tiny knives and his lungs are heavy are crushed are exploding scream can’t scream can’t breathe mama! I can’t breathe! Help me help me help me—_

Steve’s eyes fly open. He’s inside. It’s warm. It’s dry. A nurse is watching him, and a man in a three-piece suit with a fatherly grin on his face.

“Captain Rogers!” he says. “Welcome back.”

There’s a long silence. There’s a dull buzzing in Steve’s ears. The nurse takes a step forward, and the man in the suit keeps his smile on his face as he puts out a hand to stop her.

“Hi,” says Steve.

“Good morning,” says the suit man, and Steve sits up. He’s surprised he can, because, because—

“My plane,” he blurts out, then flushes. “It crashed,” he finishes lamely, and the suit man nods fondly and drops his hand so the nurse can come forward.

“It did,” he says, “but fortunately, you survived. Your body went into stasis in the ice. Remarkable thing, that serum, wasn’t it?”

Steve blinks. “Uh.” The nurse puts a hand on his shoulder so he’ll lean back against the headboard. “Yeah,” Steve offers, lamely. Something about the nurse’s pen, as she takes it from her pocket to write on a chart that is apparently Steve’s, doesn’t seem right. The buzzing is louder. “How long—?”

“I’m Alexander Pierce,” says the suit man, as if he didn’t hear the question, “I’m with the Strategic Scientific Reserve, and—”

Steve finds the source of the buzz—there’s a radio in the corner. It’s a baseball game.

“Sit up for me, please, Captain,” says the nurse. She’s holding a stethoscope. Steve does. The suit man, Alexander Pierce, is still talking, but Steve’s trying to listen to the baseball game. Something is making him itch.

“—we’re delighted to have you—”

“That game,” he says, and Alexander Piece finally stops talking. “It’s from May of ’41. I know, because I was there.” Alexander Pierce’s face doesn’t move. The nurse takes a step backwards.

“Captain Rogers,” she says.

“Where am I really?”

Steve is on his feet, and the nurse has stepped back behind Pierce, who hasn’t moved. His heart is hammering in his throat, his ears, his head; his arms hurt, his legs feel coiled. He feels sick. “Where am I really?” he asks again, more forcefully, possibilities upon possibilities rushing through his head—Germans, Zola, HYDRA, held up and experimented on like Bucky— _Bucky_ —

“Listen to me, Captain,” says Pierce, and Steve doesn’t want to, he can’t, he needs to know—

“Who are you?” he barks, and the nurse starts, and steps behind Pierce, who still won’t move his strange flat face, and Steve’s head is light and loud and he’s going to do whatever he has to to get out of this stupid tiny white room, and—

“Steve!”

The door’s flown open, and someone is rushing in, and Pierce is saying “Carter!” and someone else is yelling “Peg!” and, and—

And Peggy Carter is standing in front of him, hands up, telling him to calm down, darling, and it’s her, it’s Peggy, surely, but she’s—her hair—her face—

She’s older.

_—lungs still lead body still pinned eyes open heart roaring everything hurts everything is clear white clear blue all white hot pain can’t move can’t move back down dark again no air—_

“Where am I really,” he breathes again, and Peggy’s hands, almost her hands, her slightly different hands, her older hands, land on his chest, and push him down to the bed, and he lands softly, and he’s sure he’ll be sick, and the nurse is gone and standing next to Alexander Pierce is a garbled frowning copy of Howard Stark, and those hands that are not quite Peggy’s are on his face.

“Look at me, Steve,” she says. He does. He can’t quite focus on her, and his eyes slide to her crow’s feet, her stray curls, a vague point over her shoulder.

“We, uh. We had a date,” he says, and tilts forward until his face is in her shoulder.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for gas lighting and tipsy writing

 

It’s the first week of 1964, apparently, and Steve is spending it in a kind of modified hospital bed, in what he is told is one of many remote offices held by something called SHIELD, which is operated with the direct involvement of Howard and Peggy, and headed up by Mr. Alexander Pierce, who refers to Steve exclusively as “Captain” and is jovial about the needles they’re putting into Steve’s neck.

“Just a precaution,” is how he waves away everything, and he says it like Steve is sort of adorably naive for not knowing that already. Precautions are evidently also the reason Steve can’t call Peggy again, or even Howard. It’s the reason why he can’t have the news on, or venture out of the SHIELD safe room he’s stored in, stocked with magazines and newspapers that don’t reach past the summer of 1945. It’s the reason they’re trying harder and harder to come up with a sedative his body doesn’t chew up and spit out in under an hour, and the reason why the nurses they send to sit up with him all night are all armed. Steve suspects he isn’t supposed to know that.

“You see, Captain,” Pierce is telling him now, on what the stark little white wall calendar with Xs on each day (his own doing) is January 4th, “the world is very different from how you left it.” 

He says this a lot. It always makes Steve’s mouth dry, makes him want to show Pierce that he isn’t a child and he won’t crumple again just because Peggy’s and Howard’s faces shifted and melted and changed. He knows things will be different, but he can’t know how, and it makes him want to explode. 

“I understand that,” Steve grits out, like he has ten times already. He hates that he’s pinned to the bed, that he has to crane his neck up to look Pierce in the eye, but the IVs are many, and he doesn’t want to rip them out again—he did that on Christmas morning, without realizing where he was, and came to full awareness with the cold _o_ of a tiny pistol flat against the back of his neck, just where it began to curve into his skull, just where stem met brain. The demure nurse held the gun without flinching, more easily than Steve had held a gun the first many, many times, and calmly told him to get back into bed.

“Of course you do,” Pierce says, waving his hand easily, every button and pinstripe fairly glinting. “And I’m so sorry you’re stuck here, but you see, at present it would be a profound security risk to let the public know you’re here. Alive at all, I mean.” 

Steve’s ears prick up then; he hasn’t heard this yet, only _precautions, precautions_. 

Pierce smiles, paternally again, and gestures to the stack of newspapers Steve has beside his bed, which he arranged by date, oldest at the bottom (June 14, 1933, an outlier without any war talk and carrying no fewer than four coffee stains, rings from someone’s cup, some contemporary of Steve’s himself, wildly enough), newest at the top (August 30, 1945). “You’ve read these,” he says, sitting down at the foot of the bed, forcing Steve to fold his ankles to avoid one getting crushed. He nods.

“So you know,” says Pierce, “the kind of _power_ , the _threat_. The world is waiting with baited breath for destruction, Captain Rogers. The Soviets are waiting on a hair trigger. Just a year ago, we had warheads from Cuba pointed at Washington, we came within moments—closer, I’ll have you know, than anyone but me and maybe ten other people in the country knew—of nuclear annihilation.” 

He reaches into Steve’s stack, flips through August of 1945 easily until he can produce a blurry photo of the ruins of a Japanese city, something with an H. 

“This is the world, now, Captain, and I can’t risk the lives. The collateral damage, the scrambling—you know, I read an estimate about a year ago that no fewer than three hundred Russian men have died from failed attempts to recreate the serum that made _you_ alone?” He raises his eyebrows, and he’s handsome and serious, and Steve feels painfully young. He swallows, wishes he had more movement, but the same nurse who almost shot him (“She’s single-minded,” was all Pierce had to say on that subject) had inserted something into his collarbone that morning and he didn’t want to tug, even if it would heal.

Pierce smiles tiredly. “So you see what I’m trying to do here,” he says, folding one of Steve’s newspapers and standing, putting the paper in his pocket. It stuck out, yellowed and ugly and somehow much realer than Pierce’s slick pinstripes and glittery teeth. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he says, turning, Steve’s paper still in his pocket.

“Can I have newer newspapers?” Steve asks, furious to find his voice hoarse. “Radio?” 

“You’ve counted an extra day, Captain,” says Pierce instead, tapping Steve’s calendar. “It’s only the third.” 

And then he’s gone and the nurse is back, offering him the same radio that plays the same ten songs and six ads and two baseball games again and again and again.

***

Pierce, true to his word, is back the next day, and he tells more horror stories of the communist threat, of eastern tyranny and death tolls and the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation, of escalating promises between presidents and generals, of children being taught to crouch under their desks on the day they had hydrogen bombs dropped on their cities. 

“Can I have newer newspapers?” Steve asks again. 

Pierce chuckles like Steve made a joke.

***

Nobody comes for a few days, but they put fewer needles in Steve’s arms and they don’t take any blood and nothing is stuck into his temple or neck, nothing happens they wouldn’t do to a normal body. He’s alone for the third day the entire time, and recites the baseball games along with the radio as they go.

***

Pierce is back the next day, and he announces as he walks in that he has news from Mrs. Sousa. 

“Oh, of course,” he chuckles at the frown on Steve’s face, “I meant Ms. Carter.” 

Steve, who had been rising to shake Pierce’s hand—thrilled in part to have no IVs in him today, and determined as well to draw himself up to his full height in front of Pierce—felt as if he’d just been hit squarely between the eyes.

_Mrs. Sousa_. 

Of course, she couldn’t have waited forever—

“It’s just been a very long time since anyone’s called her that,” Pierce was saying, still smiling. “She just had her tenth wedding anniversary last summer. In any case, she told me to tell you she had to leave the country, but she’ll be back in touch soon.” 

Steve is sitting on the bed, trying to regain his balance, _Mrs. Sousa_ , his Peggy—

“Wouldn’t want to disappoint her and Howard, now would we?” Pierce is saying, and Steve looks up to find he’s being watched expectantly, that Pierce has that same warm, patient grin on his face. 

“No?” he says, and Pierce says “that’s a boy,” and then a different one of the nurses in their ties like Peggy used to wear is arriving to push him back against the bed. 

“Wait,” he says. 

“Tell me later,” Pierce says, and pats his head, and then the nurse is saying something about lie back, and Steve is wondering when he last ate, because it suddenly occurs to him he can’t remember and his head is swimming and Pierce is saying he is going to shape the century.

***

He’s back under the leaden water, his body a thousand tiny spikes of ice cracking apart to let the water in, to flood his lungs and heart and stomach and throat and smother him in the cold, so cold it’s like fire, so cold it numbs his brain and face and organs until he’s forgotten what it feels like to breathe.

***

They developed a sedative that works on a body like his. It’s unclear why he needs it so badly. Everything is swimming.

“This is important,” Pierce tells him, many times it feels like, and they changed the radio at last, because now it’s talking about the cities in Japan, the names of which Steve knew but now forgot, about the people reduced to their own shadows on the sidewalk, and Steve falls asleep.

***

When he wakes up, his calendar is gone, and there’s a note folded atop his stack of newspapers that says _Steady on, solider! Howard_. The newspapers are different, too, and when Steve picks at them, groggy, he finds that save the top one (November 24, 1963), it’s mostly a pile of clippings, mostly about the horrible things that are happening behind what Pierce had termed for him sometime earlier an iron curtain. Steve wonders what the idea is here, and when Howard started saying things like “steady on solider” and not “lend me a hand here, fuckstick,” and when he last ate, because he is fingers are shaking.

***

He wakes up in a small snowfall of newspaper clippings, stomach growling and head swimming because he can smell something real, meat and broth and potatoes, proper food. 

He sits up a little further, wonders why he feels so heavy when he hasn’t eaten in so long—and Steve knows the geography of hunger, knows all the places it makes him light—and Alexander Pierce swims into view from the overhead lights.

“Captain Rogers,” he says, “eat up. We have a mission for you.” 

 

 


End file.
